Retail’s Sizzling Start to the Holiday Season [INFOGRAPHIC]

Dec
13 2018

Ray HartjenDirector, Marketing

The holiday season is off to a roaring start for retailers across all segments, and a look inside the e-commerce numbers provides insights into shoppers, their values and their continually evolving shopping behaviors.

For many retail enterprises, the holiday season remains the most important time of the year. It’s a time of dramatically increased consumer spending and gigantic volume for retailers of all sizes, across all industry segments. This year should prove to be no exception, and RetailNext has already forecasted a strong 4 to 4.5 percent increase in holiday retail sales as compared to 2017.

Over the past decade, consumers and retailers have stretched the holiday shopping season. You’ll find promotions prior to Halloween, and there’s even a nice retail bump after the New Year. But, traditionally, it’s Thanksgiving weekend that marks the “real” beginning of the holiday shopping season, starting on Thanksgiving Thursday and ending at the end of Cyber Monday.

This year, the holiday season got off to a huge start for retail. While RetailNext saw brick-and-mortar shopper traffic decline 6.6 percent as measured year-over-year, a holistic look at retail saw big gains, led by an explosion in online e-commerce.